Bobdot-ph: A dictionary key spelling

Alan Beale

September 17, 2005

Introduction

Bobdot is a
spelling system devised by my friend and cohort Bob Boden which has
several unusual virtues. It is both extremely readable and
extremely precise, a combination not found in many reformed English
spelling systems. It has a few weaknesses which you may or may
not find important. It is strictly for American English -
spellings like fothur and sawftwer tend to make Englishmen
wince. It shows primary stress but not secondary stress. It
is very strictly phonemic, which means that it often obscures word
relationships. And it uses the same spelling, u, for the schwa
and the unstressed short u.

Bobdot-ph is a slight variant of Bobdot that I devised
while working with Bob on his Phondot
project.
Bobdot-ph corrects the ambiguity of the letter u, and has a few other
changes in order to be a bit easier for a computer program to
analyze. Bobdot-ph is as easy to read as Bobdot, and even more
precise. I believe Bobdot-ph to be a virtually ideal "dictionary
key spelling", that is, a spelling which can be used to document
pronunciation, and which could function as an auxiliary spelling system
were one so inclined.

A 30,000 word Bobdot-ph dictionary is downloadable here. The main reason you might want to
download it is that it provides, in a most readable format, a sizable
pronunciation dictionary for American English. It may be useful
to compare it to the FEWL database, which
I've previously made available to aid reformers wishing to make a
dictionary for their own systems. The FEWL database contains
significantly more information, including some guidance to British
pronunciation as well as American, but its format is much more
complex. If you have a system which is strictly for American
English, does not care about secondary stress, and does not make
special provisions for compound words, prefixes or suffixes, it is
likely that you can use the Bobdot-ph dictionary as a starting point
for your own dictionary, with substantially less effort than use of
FEWL would require.

Bobdot-ph should be blamed on me - Bob had no part in
it. I'm sure he would urge you to stick with the real
thing. I don't necessarily disagree; as I note above, the real
thing is very good. (I note that Bobdot-ph and Bobdot disagree on
about 14 % of the words in the dictionary, ignoring the use by Bobdot
of
"citation pronunciation". If one just drops the accents from
ê and û, the differences become negligible.)

Differences
between Bobdot and Bobdot-ph

The rules of Bobdot-ph are the same as those of Bobdot, with the following
exceptions:

The letter u in Bobdot-ph always designates the schwa,
as in utëmpt, rivut and ambyuluns. Where an
unstressed short u which is not a schwa occurs, the symbol û is
used in place of the Bobdot u, as in bañkrûpt
or bûcunïr.
Additionally, ûr is used to indicate the unstressed version of
the ür sound, as in hambûrgur
or netwûrk.
Because this conflicts with the Bobdot use of û for the stressed
short oo, that sound is represented in Bobdot-ph by ëu, as in òvurlëuk or sikyëur. This is very
consistent with Bobdot, which uses eu for the unstressed variant of
this sound.

Many words include a sound I call the "indistinct i",
which is sometimes pronounced as a schwa, and sometimes a short
i. Bobdot-ph spells this sound as i when the traditional spelling
uses i or a, and as u when the original spelling is o or u. The
original Bobdot spells this sound with an e when the original spelling
is e, as in kíndnes or
jaket. This is like
TS, and fits the Bobdot philosophy of "citation pronunciation", but is
not completely accurate, as the sound is never a short e.
Bobdot-ph uses ê in this case, as in kíndnês and jakêt, which allows a program
which translates Bobdot-ph to another form to make a different decision
as to how to represent the sound.

Bobdot-ph encourages the use of the underscore to
separate misleading digraphs, as in mis_hap
(avoiding a misleading sh) or alcu_hol
(avoiding a misleading uh). I call the underscore optional
because, if anyone were to ever use Bobdot-ph as a practical
orthography, I'm sure the underscores would be forgotten. Still,
they are very handy for a pronunciation guide.

Bobdot uses the spelling ng for the soft ng sound in
the last syllable of a word, but ñ elsewhere. Bobdot-ph
behaves slightly differently, in an attempt to be easier to
analyze yet no harder to read or less precise. Bobdot-ph uses the
ng spelling for this sound at the end of a word, before an inflection
such as -ing, or before an underscore (in derived words). Thus,
Bobdot lengtþ becomes leñtþ, while Bobdot upbriñing becomes upbringing, and strawñman becomes strawng_man.

Bobdot uses the spelling uh at the end of a word to
indicate the schwa sound. Bobdot-ph also uses this spelling in
cases where a syllable whose only vowel is a schwa would otherwise be
assumed to be stressed. For instance, the unstressed word 'em
would be spelled 'uhm.
This is primarily a dictionary notation. Strictly speaking, this
rule would spell the words "a", "of" and "the" as uh, uhv and thuh, but outside of the
dictionary, it would be better to treat these very common words as
sight words with a more familiar spelling (using ov for "of" to get the consonant
part right).

Dictionary notations

The downloadable Bobdot-ph dictionary uses a few more
notations that are not strictly part of Bobdot-ph, but which ease the
programming task of establishing correspondences between the
pronunciation and the traditional spelling of a word. A
dictionary entry looks like this:

Bdph_spelling
- TS (description)

where the description part is optional, and is used to
distinguish multiple pronunciations for the same spelling. A few
entries contain special characters, as follows.

A colon (:) is used in place of a hyphen in a word where a letter is
used as itself rather than phonetically, as with T:shurt or X:muhs.

The plus sign (+) is used to indicate divisions in
unhyphenated compound words that might otherwise be misanalyzed.
For example:

cou+hand -
cow+hand

where the wh digraph in the traditional spelling might be
misleading to a program.

The semicolon (;) is used to help the analysis of
difficult words by dividing them up into sections which are more easily
matched. For instance,

Hu;wö;yè
- Ha;wa;ii

where both the aw and the ai in the traditional spelling
might lead a program astray.

The broken bar character (¦) is used to represent an apostrophe,
when the apostrophe does not serve as a separator. For instance,

dón¦t
- don't

In a few words, the apostrophe in the TS is replaced by a
backquote (`), to indicate that the quote should be regarded as a
separator, for instance

wé;r -
we`re

where a program might become confused without a separator
between the e and the r in the traditional spelling.

Finally, the tilde character (~) is used when the apostrophe is not a
separator, and the sounds around the apostrophe are linked, as in

the~r - they're

The apostrophe variants above are not particularly
well-defined, and may be of use only for my specific application.
Probably, these notations can be ignored in most applications of the
dictionary.

Notes on the dictionary
pronunciations

As with the other dictionaries on this site, the
pronunciations in the Bobdot-ph dictionary were chosen by a majority
vote of three respected American dictionaries. They do not always
represent my own pronunciations. In his Bobdot system, Bob Boden
uses citation pronunciation, which sometimes calls for long rather than
short vowels in words such as because and proceed, bècäwz and pròséd in
Bobdot. Bobdot-ph does not use citation pronunciation, so that
these words are spelled bicäwz
and pruséd in the
Bobdot-ph dictionary. The Bobdot-ph dictionary does show stressed
pronunciations for normally unstressed function words, such as "to" (tú), "for" (for) and "and" (and). Only "a", "of" and
"the" are shown with an unstressed spelling.

A small number of words are listed with a different
pronunciation from the consensus dictionary pronunciation (signature
words). Usually, a minority pronunciation was chosen to avoid a
difference from a closely related word, so that, for instance, pairs
like "what" and "whatever" or "washed" and "unwashed" are pronounced
similarly. The full list of signature words is:

In addition to these words, there are a few words in the
dictionary with pronunciations using foreign sounds. These words
have been spelled in the Bobdot-ph dictionary using alternate
pronunciations which avoid these sounds, as follows: